Two hundred years of Gallerie dell’Accademia, one of the most important Italian museums, celebrated with exhibition Canova, Hayez Cicognara. L’ultima gloria di Venezia. Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara, a historian and author of a monumental History of Sculpture, loved the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of the classical era and was a follower of Winckelmann’s.

In 1808, he was appointed head of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts and was a staunch supporter of the acquisition of the Academy’s own art fund, which includes drawings by Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. He incarnates the figure of the modern cultural operator and promoter. About Canova, he wrote how he could “imprint the divine of ideal in his figure to later call them back into the human condition, dressing them with traces of natural”.

The beauty of nature, in its ideal perfection, seen through the eyes and inspiration of the artist, emerges in the over 130 pieces exhibited. Almost entirely reunited is the Homage to the Venetian Provinces one promoted by Cicognara and sent to Vienna in 1818 for the wedding of Francis I of Austria.

The set included Canova’s Musa Polimnia and a table with beautiful decorative inserts made by Giuseppe Borsato. Hayez’s paintings present in the exhibition are Rinaldo e Armida and a self-portrait.